The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Airborne Butt Cam, Snake Panic, Oops! All Cloacas

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

Sarah Gailey joins the show to discuss why one scientist put the cutest little monocles on a bunch of chameleons. (And also to talk about their new book, Spread Me, out now wherever you buy books!) Plus, Rachel talks about the great Missouri snake panic, and Lauren talks about an accidental butt cam that lead to some very useful science. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook group⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tweet at us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Click here to learn more about all of our stories! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Go check out Mary Roach's new book, ⁠⁠Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy!⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://maryroach.net/replaceable.html⁠⁠ Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to Jess' Twitch: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Produced by Jess Boddy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Popular Science: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.twitter.com/PopSci⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Theme music by Billy Cadden: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thanks to our Sponsors:  Go to https://Quince.com/weirdest for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.  Buy or sell your next car today with Car Gurus at https://cargurus.com Visit https://GrowTherapy.com/WEIRDEST today to get started.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis dummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100-day satisfaction guarantee. And like I said, you can get 20% off with code Weirdest. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code Weirdest.

That's code Weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles,

we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Feldman. And I'm Lauren Leffert. And I'm Sarah Gaylee. Yay, Sarah, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. It's so great to have you back. And I asked you back because you have a new book out. Would you tell our listeners a little bit about it? Yes. My new book is called Spread Me. It is out September 23rd from at Nightfire. Everywhere Books are sold. And it's the story of a research team that's trapped at a remote research base with a specimen who's very interested in the research lead and doesn't realize that she shares that interest. I'm really excited to read it. I've heard it described as like the thing but horny. I need this.

And that sounds great. I had no idea. This was the book. That is exactly the pitch. It's John Carpenter's The Thing if the thing had a prurient interest in the research team. Well, I've loved all of your books that I've read. So I'm sure I'll love this one too. But, you know, for today, we're excited to have you on to talk about some weird stuff.

You've learned in the course of your writing and life experiences. So thank you so much for coming back. Thank you so, so much for having me. I'm just amped. This is my favorite thing in the whole world is talking about weird stuff we know. Yeah. All right. Let's get right into it.

So on the weirdest thing I'm in this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, etc., and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was, except we don't do that last part anymore, as listeners know. All the weird things are good. They're all good and they're all weird, and we don't need to have a winner. Lauren, let's start with your tease. Yeah, my tease is that some seabirds are toilet. trained.

But only some. That science can tell us so far. It might be more. Okay. Well, that's exciting. And Sarah, what's your tease? My tease is that sometimes chameleons wear monocles.

Oh, delightful. My tease is that I'm going to talk about the time there was a snake panic in a small city in Missouri. just full-on snake panic. Snake panic would be perfect knuck tats if you have an extra finger on each hand. That is so true. You calculated that so quickly.

Constantly assessing two-word phrases for if they would or wouldn't be good on knuckle tattoos. Okay. I really actually am because my friends and I have a horrible game we play. It will ruin your social group's life, which is best knucktats for if you use. lost one or more fingers in a horrible accident. So we spent a lot of time going over. Like, you know, snake panic wouldn't be good because you would be down to, what, snack pan? Like, it's mid at best. So it's kind of like you start with the full and then if you were to lose one or more,

like it would still be good. Exactly. Like I have, I have knucked out that you can't really see them on this camera that say good work. And if I lose a couple of fingers in like a whole. horrible snake panic accident. I'll be down to goo walk. Which is great. Yeah, that's a really good. This is a solid one. I love that. Lauren, I want to hear about these potty drained seabirds, so please proceed. Yeah, of course. So I don't like all good things, it starts because two Japanese scientists were hoping to study legs. And yeah, of course. Specifically via the leg movements of

streaked shear waters, which are these really kind of like mid-sized to large Pacific seabirds that essentially run on the water to take flight. Like Jesus style, I don't know. They run to get off the surface of the water. They look like giant goals, but they're actually petrels. I don't know if that distinction matters to anybody here. They eat fish, squid, et cetera. Kind of like standard seabird lifestyle you might expect.

So the scientists wanted to know exactly how the birds were moving their legs in the lead-up to lift off. They kind of started with this biophysics question. So to answer it, logically, they captured some of the birds, 15 to be exact, and they outfitted them with these small cameras, like approximately the dimensions of a toy matchbox car. And what's important to know here is that they strapped the cameras to the underside of the birds kind of in the chest region and pointed backwards, so directed at the legs. And the setup did in fact work great to, to, to, to, record the bird's fancy footwork, but it also inadvertently documented something else. So any guesses about what they got on their backwards facing cameras. I think it was probably really

wholesome. Yeah, wholesome pooping. Both both can be true. Yeah, so that's that's right. They got a lot of poop footage. They like inadvertently invented seabird toilet TV. They got about 36 hours of video captured during the daytime. So like video that was legible and and could be understood and like an alarming amount of it was birds crapping. So in those 36 hours, there were there were 195 so-called excretion events as the scientists described them in the study, which was published in August. So if you do the rough math, that's more than five proverbial bathroom trips an hour. So in the, in the more like granular analysis the researchers did, they noted that individual birds seem to poop at set intervals plus or minus a couple of minutes. So

Okay. Yeah. So they have their little routines. They're regular. They're so regular. Like Jamie Lee Curtis, Activia commercial, regular. I don't know if that's still a relevant reference or if I'm like aging myself. I don't know if that's millennial cringe, whatever.

We keep it in our hearts. Yeah. So they have their own individual set regular intervals. One bird might go every five minutes. Another might go every 20. And aside from like short periods of diverging from that, they kept these like regular routines for the entire width of width is not the wrong, for the entire span of recording.

And the typical interval was between every four and ten minutes. So one bird goes every four to ten minutes. And I want to like take a moment here to offer up some tangential, but like still important context for understanding this. Bird poop is actually a mixture of feces and urinary excretions. Birds do not have separate plumbing for poop and pee. It all gets mixed together in like that familiar chunky white paste stuff. and comes out of one hole, the glorious cloaca.

We love a cloaca. Yeah, we love it. The all-purpose bottom hole. And it's not necessarily, like, I don't know. You don't need to know that for understanding the science. I just think it's worth remembering the marvel of nature's diversity, which is, you know, everybody poops, but not everybody poops the same. Right.

Yeah. So back to it. So they discovered the kind of astonishing regularity of birds' like clockwork bowels, I guess. but that wasn't the only weird thing they found. They also discovered another extremely notable pattern among the sheer waters, which is that the birds never or almost never, there was only one single exception. The birds never went while floating.

So out of nearly 200 poop records, only one was of a bird going while on the water. The rest occurred in flight. And it wasn't just that the birds waited until they had some super important long flying foraging journey to start. and then they dropped their waste cargo on the way up. It wasn't like preparing for a road trip or something and then you pee as a precaution at the start.

It's that sometimes the birds would take off into flight, poop, and then immediately land again, like all within less than the span of a minute. So some flights are like they look like they're basically just bathroom flights. Interesting. I think it is. I think it's fascinating, Rachel. So Shearwater is, they are really good at flying, but mostly that means there. really good at gliding, like they're graceful, they're agile. Once they get going, they can

kind of like go for a long time. But taking off is like far in a way the most energy intensive part of flying. Leo Yusaka, the lead researcher I spoke to on this study, he told me it's comparable to human sprinting. But after watching some footage and thinking about it, I think it's like, I think it's harder than that because they have to run, which is the sprint, but they also have to flap their wings really hard at the same time. So it's kind of like, it's like a full body hit workout and they have to do it every time they got to go. And again, it's not like once or twice a day, whatever. It's like more than five times an hour. Yeah. They did some fun math where they put a couple of these shear waters in a cardboard box to see like just how much poop they were releasing.

And from the box estimates, they determined that the birds excrete about five percent of their body weight every hour. It's so much. That's so much. I made a dinner. other week that was lentils and sweet potatoes. And the next day, I felt like I had a cardboard box experience. But I don't think I could repeat that every hour. Yeah, no, certainly not. Yeah, absolutely not. Yeah. I like to, it's like a continual unburdening, you know, they're like always on a cleanse. The true. Seabird cleanse lifestyle. And, you know, it actually, it has some kind of big environmental implications. Seabird guano, which is the preferred term for bulk poop, I think, is nature's marine fertilizer. It's super important for coastal terrestrial habitats and the ocean

itself. Where and when seabird's poop can determine, like, how well coral reefs grow. And like islands with coral reefs and seabird colonies have like way healthier, bigger, more robust reefs than islands without the seabird populations. Seabird poop is also really important for like terrestrial greening and coastal regions. And all of the previous estimates of seabird poop volume were kind of like taken from land estimates. So they look at kind of like how fast does a seabird nest site get plastered in this stuff. And what the study authors here found is that all of those previous estimates were like vast under estimates because shear waters that are in their floating stage of life or, you know, floating, flying marine stage of life, poop way, way more than all

those other estimates, it's probably maybe because they're like, when they're at their nest sites, they're not foraging as frequently. But when they're on the water, they're in their like feeding frenzy era. So if these new estimates are correct, the birds play a way bigger role in the nutrient cycle than previously thought. Have any of ever heard of like the whale pump or the whale poop loop? Yeah, I talked about it on we're just thing a while ago. Oh my God, maybe I learned it from you. It was around recently. I don't know that it was from me. But yeah, no, the whale pee funnel. Yeah, they just, they bring nutrients all over the world by just, just poop it and pee in.

Yeah, that is so the mark of a good, robust, long-term friendship is when you say to your friend, have you heard this thing? And they're like, I'm the one who told you that thing. This happens to me recently with my best friend and a television show that I watched on an airplane and I landed. And as soon as I landed, I was texting her, I was like, have you heard of this show? It's incredible. I think you love it. And she was like, I have been telling you to watch that show for three years.

Oh, no. Wait, which show was it? Is hacks. Oh, yeah, hacks is great. Yeah, she was like, my partner works on that show. I've been telling you to watch it. And I was like, well, I think you'd enjoy it. I made this show for you.

Oh, yeah. Anyway, hacks to whale poop to birds. Yeah, so anyway, Shearwaters might be. doing something akin to the whale poop loop. They're not quite sure on what scale or like what geographic range yet. The study authors are hoping to do follow up work where they add GPS tracking in addition to the little cameras to see if all the poop is concentrated in a specific area or pattern and might serve some local ecological purpose. But anyway, back to the Sherwater's specific flying toilet routine. Like now that the scientists know that the birds only poop on the

wing. There is this really unresolved big question of why, why they put all of that like sprinting, flapping effort into not pooping while floating when the alternative is that they could just be sitting on like the world's biggest toilet, right? Like prepared to go at all times. Like who among us has not gotten into the ocean with the specific intent of peeing and then getting back to the sandy beach? It's a feeling of pure freedom. Yeah. And like why aren't the birds that free? Why do they put themselves through this. So there are a few hypotheses which I want to throw out there. But it's, you know, before I get anyone's hopes up, none of these have been settled yet.

This is very initial pilot research. It was all an accident. Remember, they just wanted to film the legs. They weren't trying to get into this freaky poop stuff. Yeah. Absolutely the best science comes out of scientists trying to do only like marginally weird things and then ending up doing like far, far, stranger things. Stranger things.

I don't know. I can even say that. Is there a copyright against saying that? Anyway, the hypotheses, one is that maybe this is like the most logical, is that they just wanted to drop weight in preparation for every flight, like sort of self-explanatory, but the waste can be heavy. There's no need to hold on to it. And, you know, in those flights that I mentioned earlier,

where the birds took off and then landed really quickly after going, it's possible that those flights were aborted for some other reason and maybe they weren't actually bathroom-specific takeoffs. But you'd have to ask a bird to know, I guess. It's just that poopin correlates with fly it. Yeah, this is a correlative study, not a causational study. We cannot know the true answer. But an inverse possibility is that flying actually makes it easier to poop.

So maybe the process of like bearing down, flexing wing, getting the run going, maybe that triggers some sort of release reflex. But the counter to this is that when the birds are on land at their nesting sites, just kind of walking around, they do, they poop frequently just on their little feet. And so maybe the explanation that requires the least amount of hand waving is that it's like some sort of evolved version of bird hygiene. It might be that the birds really just prefer not to poop where they float. And, you know, that they're trying to avoid foraging, diving, swimming in their own muck. although you might notice that like geese and ducks and other birds seem to have like no real problem with it. They're fine with it. So, you know, maybe it's a species by species preference.

One other thought, it might be a predator avoidance strategy. Like a big cloud of poop could be an immediate go-ahead signal for a shark or seal to like, chomp. That hand motion did not translate on audio. But it was great. But thank you. The audience will know. They'll be. They'll feel it. Yeah, the upward Pac-Man, whatever, kind of vaguely Italian. But the predator avoided's thing, that would only make a difference if the birds are traveling far enough away from where they started before landing again.

And then the last kind of possible hypothesis that the study authors could come up with is that maybe pooping into saltwater is simply like a little unpleasant. When a bird poops, it has to expose some sensitive cloacal tissue that's like usually internal. It's kind of like a spink. sphincter opening. So it's possible that the salt water irritates that. But there's no clear evidence suggesting one thing over the other or a potential unknown hypothesis.

And maybe it's multiple. But the, oh, yeah. I want to just put my little like roulette chip on that last one because of a conversation I had with a friend of mine who has been trying so hard to convince me to do sensory deprivation. tank time. She's like, a float tank would just be so good for you. And I'm like, alone with my thoughts for a full hour, I would, I would choose death. I would choose death immediately first.

Yeah. And once when she was, I don't know how she thought this was going to increase the chances of me doing this, but she was trying to get to me to do it. And she goes, it's really cool because it's salt water and it's at a very specific like salinity so that you just float in the middle of it. And the only thing is, she was like, I'm going to give you a tip right now. And I was like, I'm not going to do this activity. so I don't need the tip.

And she said, I'm telling you anyway, when you go in, bring some like Vaseline or aquifer and put it on your ears and your nose and like around your eyes and on your butthole because the salt water is like very saline and it'll dry out your mucus membranes. It's uncomfortable. But if you put a little like occlusive layer, you won't have to do with that. And I said, great, I'm not doing any sense ever. But if I was floating in a sensory deprivation chamber. because I don't know, I pissed off the villain from Saw somehow.

And I was pooping in there five times an hour. I have to imagine that, yeah, your cloaca would dry out. Wow. I think you've maybe just solved this through like a very niche personal experience. You're welcome, burn scientists. We need... It all makes sense to me. Yeah, this is why we need more representation in science.

We need people who specifically have friends petitioning them to undertake saltwater deprivation tank experiences. that's the only way we'll know why the birds don't poop while they're floating. We got a Vaseline. We got a Vaseline the Cloacas. I had like a little kicker thing I was going to say, but I think I'm just going to end it there. Great. I'm sorry.

That's better. That's better than a pun. Yeah. Wow. This is a great study. I definitely remember seeing it in the headline. and had no idea that it was a total accident. And what a beautiful thing for scientists to discover inadvertently.

Yeah. And the footage is out there. You can see it if you want. Wow. I don't really know. You know we all do. I'm glad I have the option. Okay.

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Okay, we're back. And I'm going to talk about the snake panic in Missouri. Snake panic at the disco. Our story starts in August of 1953. In the very small city of Springfield, Missouri, it's like a city the same way the city I grew up in, Vineland is the city. It had like 60,000 people. And something fairly routine happened.

Someone found a snake in their yard and they killed it with a gardening hoe. Gardening hos will be important to this story. A lot of hoes in here. Yeah, Missouri has dozens of native snakes. So again, seeing one in your yard and having to dispatch it, not a huge deal. But this one did strike the resident as looking kind of funny. Apparently before he struck this long black snake down, it had raised its head. head and spread its hood. Now, if your instinct is that none of the dozens of snakes in

Missouri casually have hoods, that would be correct. That is not a thing that the chill snakes of Missouri have going on. So they did, he brought the carcass to a local pet shop, and the pet shop owner said it was harmless. I will note that one news article is out there saying that he said it was a puff adder with a weird head. She's like, it's a weird looking puff adder. and that that was nothing to worry about. And I was like, that's surprising to me because I think puff adders are really dangerous. And if you are researching this story

and you too were confused, here's the explanation. Puff adders generally refer to a highly venomous and notoriously aggressive snake from Africa, which definitely would have been both surprising and worrying in a small city of Missouri. But it seems that confusingly, Missourians sometimes use the term Puff Adder to refer to the eastern hog-nose snake,

an entirely non-venomous and non-threatening snake. Hognows is so sweet. I know. They're so cute. You know, obviously, you know, informal unscientific names, like there's a ton of overlap. Things can randomly have the same common name. But I feel like you shouldn't use a name that's also the name of an entirely venomous thing. I have a sweet little hog-nosed snake.

It's like the incredibly deadly viper and series of unfortunate events. I actually, I spent a semester at the University of a semester to Cape Town when I was in college. And the campus is beautiful and backs up to a national park. And I would often go on like hikes after classes. And I once with a friend came upon like a puff adder like mating aggregation in like the middle of the trail. Oh, just a hay. And it was, I mean, it was like three or four of them, I think kind of like twisting and writhing. And we like sat there for a while wondering like, huh, like what do we do here? And we were very close to the end of this loop trail that we were on like a hundred meters away from the end of it. And instead of trying to figure out a way

to cross what was happening, you just went back. Yeah, we reverse the whole thing. From what I know of puff adders, that's probably smart. Because again, not only are they venomous, but they are like one of those venomous snake species that it's like, yeah, this snake can just get pissed off at you. Most of them, it's like, well, don't step on it and it won't bite you. But, you know, every once in a while there's one where it's like, yeah, we might want to bite you. We debated the leap over and decided it like simply well, it's not worth it.

I think you probably made the right call. Yeah, I've been to parties like that where I like go to get my coat and I end up being like, I just got to get out of it. There's a bunch of puff adders mating on the pelicans. Do what you're doing. And I'll get a new coat. So back in Missouri, a week later,

someone across the street also had to kill a snake. Basically, a guy saw his bulldog attacking a snake in the bushes. So he rushed out. He pulled his dog away from the snake, good pet owner. And then he grabbed his own garden hoe and bashed the snake. Wait, he had it with him on a walk with his dog? No, he was like in his dog. Do you not take a full complement of gardening tools on your dog walks?

You know, I try to be prepared for everything. You never know when you might need to get some hoag done. And presumably he had talked to his neighbor. I have to imagine, you know, guys who lived across the street from each other in Springfield, Missouri in the 1950s surely gabbed all the time. So he knew that this was the second weird-looking snake that had shown up on their street in a week. So they actually called the cops. And then... Naturally.

The snake cops. Yeah. Arrest this dead snake. They don't have hands. They can't be contained. They took the snake, not to the pet store, but crucially, to a local high school science teacher. And that science teacher was like, my dudes, this is an Indian cobra.

So yeah, the species naja naja is native to the Indian subcontinent. And it's actually, it is venomous, for sure. And it is a member of the big four species. that together are responsible for most of the snakebite cases in India and Sri Lanka. So not native to Springfield, Missouri. Definitely a cause for concern. And yeah, they're really, if you're imagining like a stereotypical cobra, that's what Nodinat does look like.

They have the big hoods. They like stand up on their little bodies and wiggle around with their hoods open. They really, they are designed to make you. go, oh, I think that snake could probably kill me. And the pet store owner had just been like, that's a weird looking hog-nosed snake. That's a weird-looking hog-nose snake. Don't worry about it. Something's got, it has a weird head.

Listen, who among us doesn't have a weird head. Yeah, yeah. You know, we can't judge. So from then until that October, altogether, there were at least 11 Indian cobras captured or killed in Springfield. mostly with garden hose, keeps coming up. One man did spot a snake in the road and hit it with a carjack, and then when that didn't work, he got back in his car and ran over it repeatedly. People were understandably very freaked out. So if they didn't have a garden hoe on hand, which was apparently the go-to for locals dealing with more pedestrian snakes, people just

kind of threw whatever they had at it. At one point, a snake. One source I read said it was a seven-foot-long bow constrictor, but most just refer to it as another cobra. So honestly, do not know what the snake was, but it was definitely a not native Missouri snake. It slithered under a house after the homeowner, like, threw a rock at it. And then he was like, oh, no, there's a snake under my house. Like, we can't just keep living like this. So the police came again to arrest the snake. And they first tried to use some kind of lasso on a stick to catch the snake. But that completely failed. So then they threw a canister of tear gas under the house, which did... Classic police solution. Yeah, yeah, which did get the snake out, but then once it emerged, they fired

five slugs at it. Some sources imply that having been shot five times, the snake was still alive. Others imply that they missed all five shots, and that's why the snake was still alive. unclear, but they definitely failed to kill it. And then supposedly a garden hoe was called in for backup, and they took care of the snake. So unsurprisingly, all of these snakes caused a major panic. You know, kids were kept inside. The hospital in this random small city in Missouri had to get a shipment of anti-venom. Were all of the snakes that were being killed actually cobras? So the 11 we're talking about, these were like, we saw them, we looked at them, and we're pretty sure they're close. Okay, cool.

Of course, this having happened in the 1950s, it's possible some of them weren't, but actually a lot of them were preserved. So we do know that like there were a lot of Indian cobras running around this town. Surely some people just got freaked out by a regular ass snake because of what was happening, totally understand but yeah. This is what happens when a traveling door-to-door cobra salesman buys a cheap briefcase. And, you know, he's walking from one house to the next and the latch comes undone. And all his cobras fall out. And now what's he's supposed to do?

Infomercial style. I can't, I can't contain all these cobras. There has to be a better way. And yeah, at one point, this guy Del Kaywood, who was Springfield's acting city manager, He actually, he rented a van with a speaker system and played, quote, Indian snake charmer music. Don't know what that would have sounded like. Probably was just kind of racist. But police officers and a local snake militia would kind of prowl around as he played this music from the van, like carrying garden hose and other potentially deadly snake weapons.

Many stories about this get a good chuckle out of being like, well, snakes are deaf. So that wouldn't have worked. Fun fact, that is not strictly speaking true. Snakes lack ear drums, but they do have inner ears, which can pick up on both vibrations in the ground and very low frequency airborne sounds. They do have trouble with higher pitch sounds, so it's true that the snake charmer music would not have done anything in particular for them, though maybe the rumble of a truck and a bunch of people carrying garden hose might have gotten their attention.

And also, speaking of snake charming, total BS. look mesmerized because they're just tracking the movement of the charmer the same way they track any potential threat. And the real trick of a snake charming act is not letting the snake bite you, which is generally managed in ways that are a bummer. Like sometimes they'll sew part of a snake's mouth shut so we can only stick its hang out or they'll keep them really hungry or dehydrated, so they're like too weak to strike. So yeah, snakes don't get charmed. Definitely not by like racist music coming from an ice cream truck or whatever they had rented in Springfield, Missouri. But the point is, they really tried everything.

And there were a lot of people out there, boots on the ground, trying to hunt down snakes. And again, you know, I've talked about like, I've talked about panics on the show before. You know, the mad gasser of Matun is a great one where probably not much actually bad stuff was going on. and people were just freaking out. This is a situation where we do know there were, there was a non-zero number of non-native incredibly venomous snakes. So I can really understand why they were just in a tizzy about it. Luckily, no one was ever bit or otherwise injured,

which really speaks to, I would say, the like baseline snake handling sensibilities of people in Missouri in the 1950s. so good for them. Garden hoe. This is a garden hoe advertisement. Yeah, basically. And also, fortunately, for all residents, no eggs were found. This did not become a perpetual problem. It's assumed that all of the escaped snakes were either male or female. So they did not get together in a mating tangle. And this was a self-limiting problem. And indeed, people calm down as the winter approached because they were like, the snakes aren't going to survive. There were rumors until that following spring that there was a local quarry where there were

some steam vents and they were like, what if some of them made it in there? They could totally survive in there. They're going to reemerge come spring. But no, this problem went away as it got cold. And also, you know, it wasn't all bad. You know, Springfield's residents capitalized. on this thing, which became an international news story. A lot of area bars had cobra cocktails, and there were cobra-themed bumper stickers and other swag. Springfield had already had a snake

on its official city seal, and it was temporarily modified to resemble a hooded cobra. So plan to boost the local economy, release invasive, or not native, not native venomous snakes. Yeah, exactly. It turns out it works really well. And yeah, when one of these cobras, was captured and brought to the zoo. It was huge hit. Like thousands of people from the area came to look at it. So yeah, you know, they made the most of it. But you may be wondering, how did this happen? You know, Sarah made a great point, traveling salesman with a shoddy briefcase. Totally possible. Unsurprisingly, a lot of people blamed that pet store owner I mentioned earlier. And not just because he completely dropped the ball in a really embarrassing way on identifying

the first deadly cobra. He did keep some pretty exotic animals. So they were like these random exotic snakes definitely came from this guy's pet store. He was adamant that he had not had a sudden loss of snake incident. Apparently he lost his business permit and left town and he maintained his innocence until his death in 1977. And it turns out he was kind of responsible, but not in the way most people thought. So the truth came out in 1988 when a man named Carl Barnett, who had been convinced by a friend that people deserved to know the truth and by a lawyer that probably nothing would come of it all these years later, he took the blame slash credit for the Cobra incident. And it's a pretty fantastic story, in my opinion. So back in August of 1953, Barnett was 14 years old.

And this guy, Carl, he had a deal with the pet shop owner. He would go collect some of the many boring old local snakes that existed in Missouri that people killed with garden hose all the time. And he would bring them in and he would trade them for exotic aquarium fish, which he was very interested in amassing. And at one point, they traded and the fish died almost immediately. And Carl was super pissed. He was like, you cheated me. I collected all these snakes. And the fish is already dead. And apparently the pet shop owner was very unsympathetic and told him, you know, tough luck. And Carl, who again was just 14 at the time and had a, you know, a real sense of justice. He went around the best.

back on his way out and he saw a crate of snakes. I don't know how he knew the crate was full of snakes. Did it say snakes on it? Did he hear snakes hissing? Who knows? But he says he just came across this crate of snakes and presumably he either thought they were the various snakes he'd captured or he just figured like an eye for an eye, a snake for a snake. So he let them loose because he was like, this is fair. You know, this guy cheated me out of a fish. I'm going to, I'm to mess up his snake operation. And then he just forgot about it. I guess it didn't occur to him that these angry hissing hooded snakes that came out when he opened the crate were like not chill to have roaming around. Or maybe he knew immediately and he was just like, oh, oh, and left.

But he moved on. And then as soon as news broke about the big cobra mystery, he was like, oh, no. And it seems like he just sort of got the sweats at any time. another snake showed up. There's a quote from him in the newspaper being like, I've never been so scared in my life once I realized what I'd caused. For years, I was afraid they'd figure out it had been me. And off to jail, I'd go. He said, it is definitely the biggest thing I ever was involved in in my life.

The biggest thing I ever was involved in. Yeah. But so, okay, the 14-year-old kid, sure, he, like, released the snakes. But did that pet shop owner, like, have the permits for, like, a shipment of venom Cobra's? Like, how did that work? That's such a good question, Lauren. And the thing is I have to say in 1953, I don't know what kind of permits there were for that. There wasn't like snake FDA or whatever. I don't think if there were laws about it, I do not think they were being enforced. I mean, this pet shop owner is definitely not without blame. He had a crate of cobras outside his shop.

And he definitely knew that these cobras were his cobras. He just always. He never thought that was a weird hog-nose snake. He knows what a cobra. He ordered the cobras. He was like, crap. These are the snakes that went missing last week. They showed him that weird hog-nose, and he looked at it, and he said, that looks so similar to the snake from the snake catalog that I ordered. That never showed up.

Never showed up. Yeah, from snake seers. Yeah. He's on the phone with customer service being like, I know you have to send me another crate of, cobras. They never arrived. And then the bell over his shop door rings and this guy shows up with this dead snake and he goes, hmm. What a coincidence. Yeah, exactly. It's like if we're talking about sort of who is ultimately responsible for this having happened and gotten out of control, I do think it was a pet shop owner. But in his defense, they wouldn't have been all over town if not for the

spurtainian again. And it seems like the pet shop. shop owner, it wasn't like he wasn't trying to fix the problem. One of the reasons people suspected him is that after the like second snake sighting, he was seen like going around town with a sack, like trying to catch the snakes. You know, it's everybody knew they had come from this snake guy's place. They just didn't know the details until 1988 when Carl came clean. And yeah, one of the last snakes captured in this event is preserved at Drew. University in Springfield, though it is no longer on display to the public. They moved it to a different area that's only accessible to students and faculty. And people were like, where's the cobra?

So, you know, the mystery continues, though the answer to this one's pretty simple. It's just in a part of Drew University you can't see. But yeah, I think my favorite thing about this story is just how good apparently people from Missouri were at killing snakes in the 1950s. And how much worse this could have been if they did not have those garden hosegills? Like the fact that no one was bitten is actually kind of incredible. Yeah, the American Southeast with like even more venomous snakes. Yeah. It's also kind of miraculous that there weren't any eggs, not just if, I mean, if all of the snakes were male,

then that would make sense. But if all of them were female, a lot of snake species can participate in parthenogenesis. That is true. They clone themselves in spontaneous. They just go, this place is so great. The only thing wrong with it is that needs more snakes.

And then they just clone themselves into an egg and they make more snakes. Well, and it's also, like, how hard is it to sex a cobra? Because when I was a kid, I got two hamsters from the pet store that they assured me were certainly both female. And then they were not. And then I had 15 hampses.

So I feel that that couldn't have been, I don't know, maybe they were better at hunting for snakes than they were hunting for eggs. Maybe there were eggs, you know? And, you know, winter did happen. So it's totally possible that just that is what fixed the problem. But they sure got through the worst of it, thanks to their garden hose. Yeah, visit a hardware store near you. Yeah. Wild. All right, we're going to take one more break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill for burner gas grill on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $49. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot.

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Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network Okay, we're back. And Sarah, it's time for your fact. Before we go into my part, I do just want to share that I almost was also presenting a marine bird fact. When you were like some seabirds are potty trained, I was going to lose my mind if we had an all seabirds episode. It would have been so thrilling. That would have been great. Do we get like a teaser for the alt fact that wasn't, or do we just have to wait for your next weirdest thing appearance? Oh.

Oh, I'll happily tease it. Marine birds have secret kidneys above their eyes. It's such a wild paste of secret kidneys. So like in their forehead? My last guess. Yeah, above each eye, they have something called the salt gland that is a specialized gland that exists to remove salt from their bloodstream, which they then sneeze. or drip out of their nose is a highly concentrated saline solution that allows them to drink sea water. Wow.

Incredible. That's not even the fact. No, that's not even the fact. All right. So, yeah, that's not even the fact. My fact is about another cloaca creature, which it is nice that this is an Uppsal Cloakas episode. Oh, that's true. I want to talk to you about one of my favorite creatures on the planet.

It's a chameleon. and share some neat stuff with you about chameleon vision. Incredible. So I have a warm up for this, which is also not quite the fact, but it's just cool. If you picture a chameleon in your mind, palus, look at its face and look at the things that it uses to see stuff. And tell me, are you looking at the chameleon's eyeball? Yes. I thought I was.

But it's got like a pen. They can move them in a way that I cannot move my eyeballs. But there's still eyes in there, right? It is such a crime that your listeners can't see. Both of you just were doing the hands from that Benicio del Toro. Oh, Pamphabrant. The baby eater. I think about him all the time.

It's on your page. You're not looking at the commune's eyeball. you are looking at the chameleon's eyelid, which is fused shut over the chameleon's eye with only a pinhole for the pupil to see out of. Otherwise, their eyes are completely sealed behind a single fused eyelid. Wow. Okay, wait. I'm like revising my understanding. So it's like you've got the scaly skin orb and then like a little hole and then over that it's like permanently covered by a lens or by by a skin.

by a lid. Yeah. So the scaly skin, eyelid, so you have, you both have two eyes just for listeners to be aware.

You both have two eyes. If you close your eye, or both eyes at once, as you please, then just imagine that you can't ever undo that motion. And so in order to see,

you just get a little hole poked in your eyelid right where your pupil is so that you can look out of that. Wow. What a system. That seems, I mean,

that seems like it would be worse, but who have I to say? It's not my preference, but I'm not going to judge chameleon's choices. It's, you know, it's their body. Now we're warm and we're ready to think about chameleon eyeballs. So I'm going to take us into the wonderful world of chameleon vision modification. So you, as I said a moment ago, astute listeners may recall that you each have two eyeballs, as do I, personally. and we use those two eyeballs to engage in something called binocular vision.

What that means is that our brains take input from left eye and right eye and use the disparity between what information comes into each eyeball to determine how far away things are. If you cover one of your eyes and then you reach for something, you're going to do a much worse job being able to grab it on the first try because you're only getting one input and you need that binocular vision for your brain to process the optical input into distance information. That's how our vision works. Chameleon's eyes are, they protrude laterally, so they stick out of the side of the

chameleon's head, and they each move independently. That gives chameleon's panoramic vision, which is pretty sweet. They can see in 360 degrees, but it means that their brains can't process information from their eyes using binocular vision processing. They're monocular. They see from one eye completely, but they don't process both of those inputs at the same time into like a depth perception amount of information the way that we do.

So it's kind of like when I take a pano photo on my phone and everything is flattened and stretched and terrible and weird? Exactly, yes, except the chameleons like it that way. This is their strong preference with their fused eyelids. Now, do either of you know what chameleons eat? Bug? Is it bug? It frequently am bug.

Sometimes very large chameleons, such as the Madagascan chameleon, eat birds, which I find really alarming. I'm not sure exactly why it feels so objectionable. Cloaca on cloaca crime. Yeah. You can be doing that. I also like to think that I'm more like bird than I'm like bug, and so this is one step closer to chameleons eat meat.

Sure. Yeah. Which I don't prefer. In order to catch their prey, chameleons ballistically launched their tongues into the air toward their prey to catch it. They have a tapered hyoid bone in their throat. That's your hyoid cartilage is where your Adam's apple is. And they have a bone there that it's shaped like a ramp.

And so they'll pull their tongue all the way back to their hyoid bone like a slingshot and then let it go and it launches ballistically out of their mouth to catch their prey. Have you ever caught a flying bug with your tongue on purpose? Not on purpose. I have gotten kind of good at getting mosquitoes with my hand, but like out of the air. But no, not with tongue yet. But who is to say that I couldn't learn? I believe that you could.

I love your skill catching mosquitoes out of the air, especially because I am allergic to mosquitoes. So every time someone kills one, I get to live another day. I think it would be a lot harder for you to catch the mosquitoes if you didn't have access to depth perception, though. And you're using your hand, which is very dexterous. And chameleons are using their tongue, which is like a tongue. It's like a tongue nowadays. So for a long time, scientists were asking the question, how chameleons do you do that? How do you catch the bug when your eyeballs work the way that they were?

And for a long time, there was a hypothesis that they were using stereoscopic image processing so that the idea was that their brains were taking these two completely disparate panoramic monocular views and somehow layering them over each other. But that hypothesis just didn't hold water because. again, chameleons process information completely independently from each eye

so they can be watching a bug with one eye and assessing a threat with the other eye and those things just don't overlay. So in the 60s, an enterprising scientist,

I believe Lindsay Harkness, but I need to double check my source material on that so I will try to get that to you for the show notes. Designed an experiment.

The scientist got his hands on a lot of chameleons. Maybe he went to the same pet store. Maybe he had the snake store hookup. He just lifted the chameleon grate in the back of the store. This scientist had a tropical fish that died way too soon and he went to get revenge and found a big crate labeled

chameleons. And he went, you know what? I'm going to do some science on these. He had these chameleons in his laboratory. And he painstakingly, crafted tiny monocles, half of which were your vision more far-sighted and half of which were to make your vision more near-sighted. So similar to when you go to the optometrist and they have the lenses over your eyes and they

go like one or two, one or two. You know, those lenses, some of them make your focal distance closer and some make your focal distance farther away. And he created these miniature monocles and affixed them to the, you know, and affixed them to the the chameleons eyes, one on each side of disparate focal length disruptions, and then he dangled bugs near the chameleons on either side, and the chameleons consistently missed the bugs with their tongues by the precise distance of the focal length change. So he used these monocles to prove that the chameleons were processing distance information separately.

with each eyeball. Wow. And using the results of that experiment combined with probably non-invasive, non-painful, really pleasant means of finding out what's inside a chameleons eye that the chameleons probably liked and they were probably fine by the end of this. Scientists determine that chameons combine having a concave lens inside their eye. That's called a negative lens. And the shape of it is concave.

their cornea is convex, and they combine the concave lens with the convex cornea to create inside of each eyeball a rangefinder. Well, just like on your fancy DSLR camera or I assume on some kind of gun accessory, this rangefinder basically adjusts until the the thing that it's looking at is in focus and then uses that adjustment to determine how far away the thing is. Whoa. And that is how chameleons see bug in order to eat bug using their ballistically launching tongue. That's incredible. So they're like, is something within their eye actually changing in response?

Like, is there like a, you did this kind of like twisty motion with your head? hands, is there some sort of physical telescoping change? I, okay, this is coming up against the limit of my eyeball knowledge. So I'm going to say, I'm going to say as close as I can get to understanding this, but it's not going to be, it's not going to get us all the way there. Tiny muscles inside your eye make minute adjustments to the, I believe, the position of your lens in your eye. and to the shape of your cornea in order for you to focus on things that are near and far. This is part of why you can get eye fatigue and eyes drain if you spend 100% of your time,

for instance, looking at a computer monitor. I don't know anything about that. It doesn't sound like me at all. So I believe the twisty motion I was making was, for listeners, it was kind of like a horizontal pepper grinder motion, and that's based on nothing. That is just that is me being like, is this how a zoom lens works? I have no idea. I do believe that there are physical changes made inside the eye for anyone when you're

focusing on something near or far. However, human eyes have a convex lens and a convex cornea, which we use to focus on things. So we're not using the disparity between our cornea and our lens to range. find because we're using that binocular vision. But so we, so I mean, objectively, chameleine eyes are better than ours because they only need one eye to do what our two eyes do, which is discern depth. And so if we, if we were more highly evolved species, we might have, have two chameleon eyes or just one single big eye that did the same thing, our two eyes did.

I think one single big eye would be more aesthetically streamlined. Yeah. But two eyes pointing in different directions would let us look. two bugs at once, which is kind of the dream. Yeah. I do also just, I want us to acknowledge the amazing emotional and philosophical journey that you've taken within the last 15 minutes because when we were talking about fusing your eyelids shut and poking holes in them, you were saying that you thought that sounded

bad to do and less good than the way that we do it. And now you're saying that you think chamele and eyes actually are better and superior. And that's just like amazing growth. Yeah, I've been convinced they won the eye contest, which, okay, you, I am, I'm a pescatarian, which might sound completely unrelated, but as a pescatarian, I'm sometimes trying to convince my vegetarian partner that the foods that I'm eating are like normal and good and like maybe not as upsetting to him as some of them may be. And one of those foods is sometimes scallops. And I think the idea of eating a scallop is like uniquely upsetting because it's like a whole self-contained little guy

to him. Like it's the whole guy and you're eating it all at once as opposed to like a piece of something larger. And one time in an effort to explain that scallops, it was, it was okay. For some reason, I brought up the fact that they have dozens of eyes, sometimes up to 200 eyes. That is powerful piece of information for him, I'm sure. Yeah. It didn't, it didn't help the situation. And in fact, continues to not be helpful to the situation. But the hundreds of eyes with everybody. A thing that I have come to realize is that describing them as eyes is maybe misleading because like they're much more basic in terms of what they're seeing.

They're really just light detectors. So like I like photo receptors may have been better. Maybe that would have made them sound more like plants. I don't know. But I think it's fair to refer to all eyes as photoreceptors. I think we've kind of like as humans, we've anthropomorphized the eye, what it does, what it means. but like really we just have fancy photoreceptors and chameleons just have fancy photoreceptors. And so I think calling it the focal organ, yeah, I think we have to distance our emotionally distance ourselves from the eye.

Wow. I am now. I'm always trying to emotionally distance myself from the eye personally. Ego death. I just, now I'm just thinking, do I prefer eating a whole guy at once or a piece of a guy? Which, of course, naturally makes me think of the mola mola, the sunfish, which is like a big floating circle and other animals will just come and take like a chomp out of it from time to time. Yeah, they look really dumb after. I mean, they kind of look dumb always.

God bless them. But they look especially dumb after somebody's just taking a big chump. But like is that preferable? Is it preferable to come take a chop out of a mola mola than to eat a whole entire 200 photoreceptor having? little guy. Does it regrow the chomp? Or does it stay like perpetual bitten sea pringle or something? Does it die? I mean, I think they can, they can, they seem to be able to survive a good number of chumps. I think they just sort of heal but look battle scarred by chomps. We really like fact or a boris in on ourselves. We're like in a completely uncharted territory now. Well, now we're getting into some really

deep philosophical questions, which is maybe a good place to leave our listeners. But first, Sarah, would you remind them what your new book is called so they can go find it? Yes, absolutely. My new book is called SpreadMe. It is available everywhere books are sold. If you like things that are scary, things that are horny, or hypothetical new forms of lichen, this book is for you. Damn. Wow. That last one really got me. All three, baby. All three. Sign me up. Yeah. Only. Only the Venn diagram where those three things overlap. That's where you'll find me. Yeah.

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